


Steve Rogers’ forward to"Fighting for Tule Lake," by Jim Morita

by MotherInLore



Series: So, I Guess my Muse wants Marvel, now... [8]
Category: Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Comment Fic, Gen, Japanese internment camps, Period Typical Attitudes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-09
Updated: 2018-09-09
Packaged: 2019-07-08 19:56:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 793
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15937199
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MotherInLore/pseuds/MotherInLore
Summary: Exactly what it says on the tin





	Steve Rogers’ forward to"Fighting for Tule Lake," by Jim Morita

When I first woke up in the current century, SHIELD gave me a lot of books and things to try and catch me up, and they told me that the Howling Commandos were famous now, subject of all kinds of memoirs and movies and radio serials and scholarly articles and books. They never thought to mention, though, that one of those books was written by my old pal, Jim Morita, and they didn’t give me a copy. So the first time I read _Fighting for Tule Lake,_ it was a marked-up copy I found on the “read and return” spinner at the public library in Klatsaand, Oregon, and took to the beach with me. It was really something. I’ve been thinking about it, off and on, ever since.

To start with, I was delighted to be able to hear my friend’s voice again, coming as clear off the page as he did over the airwaves, always making every word count. It was like having Jim there with me, and, through him, the rest of the gang. There was Falsworth. There was Dum-Dum. There, finally, was the real story behind that business with the crickets, and I swear I’ll find a way to get you back for that, Frenchy, I don’t care if you are dead. But there, too, were all kinds of things that Jim would never have said in the flesh, and they just about broke my heart. 

Because that's the thing - He almost never said anything about it: about what it meant to go through the kind of hell we went through, on the orders of the president who signed Executive Order 186. He didn’t talk about being worried about his family in the camps, or about being angry about not being offered the freedom he was fighting for. He knew, as we all did, that the other guys were worse, and all the rest of it fell into the categories of “don’t whine,” and “don’t show your dirty laundry in public.” Maybe he and Gabe thought they were protecting the rest of us, by not infecting us with their doubts and ambiguities. I hope it was that, and not that they felt like they couldn’t trust us to take their side. So that was what I felt as I read the book: joy and nostalgia and sorrow. And then I read some of the supplementary material, about what Jim had to go through to get this book published, and I got mad. 

Jim finished the manuscript for _Fighting for Tule Lake_ in 1954. He submitted it for publication with sixteen different houses and got it sent back; this is when Dum-Dum’s memoir was on the best-seller list and the Captain America Radio Hour played in every living room in the States. SHIELD apparently stepped in and tried to talk him into toning everything down except the heroic anecdotes. Nothing doing. Jim apparently shouted Peggy Carter down when she accused him of disloyalty. (A rare misstep for her, and I’ll tell you now, I don’t know if I could’ve stuck to my guns the way Jim did.) Jim reached out to his other connections. Gabe Jones had decided to stay in Paris to complete his medical degree in a place that was more welcoming to men with dark skin than the U.S. was at that time, and he had befriended Ralph Ellison and a number of other American expats and thinkers. And so it was that one of the most beautiful and complex accounts we have of the American experience of war was first published by the Sorbonne University press. 

And of course that wasn’t the end of it, because no one can hide the truth forever. I’ve seen the footage from the HUAAC investigation, and Jim’s takedown of that horse’s ass senator was a joy to behold. _Tule Lake_ found allies in places Jim would never have guessed were possible. (He thought the Mitford sisters were weird enough; I don’t know what he would have made of being quoted so enthusiastically by Alan Ginsburg, et al.) And now his masterpiece is required reading in at least a few high schools in this great country of ours.

Jim knew better than most of us how fragile America’s promise can be. He knew that, while Hitler and Hydra may have been defeated, the kind of fearful, lazy thinking that created willing patsies for them lives on everywhere, and he kept up the fight with rare courage and determination. I wish I could have been there to keep up the fight with him for all those years. At least, though, I, and now you, have the honor of listening to Jim’s clear voice telling us some hard truths, and trying to understand.

**Author's Note:**

> This version of what Morita did after the war started out as a plotbunny where someone was explaining to their supersoldier boyfriend why Morita had actually been their favorite Howlie. But I think it works better on its own.


End file.
